Shaunta and Adrienne Grimes created an online writing school where they get to write alongside their students, teach what they love, and bring in 25% of their revenue through paid newsletters—all while keeping the personal connection that makes Ninja Writers feel like family.
“A good story well told can change the world.”
That’s the belief at the heart of Ninja Writers, the online writing school Shaunta Grimes and her daughter Adrienne run for fiction writers who’ve always dreamed of finishing their book.
Meet Ninja Writers: a community built by writers, for writers
Here’s what makes Ninja Writers different from other writing businesses: Shaunta and Adrienne aren’t just teaching writing, they’re writers themselves. Every morning at 9 a.m. ET, they open up Zoom for a free writing sprint where anyone can drop in and write with them for an hour.
But they’re not just hosting it. They’re writing their own books right alongside their students. It’s this philosophy—teaching and writing at the same time—that shapes everything about their business.
Shaunta has been a writer her whole life, but she’s also a teacher at heart.
“Being a teacher was always my fallback,” she says. “If I can’t be a writer, then I guess I’ll go be a teacher.”
Instead she built a business where she gets to do both: “I managed to build a life where I get to teach all the time, all day long, and be a writer at the same time,” she says. “Sometimes I just sit and think, ‘how did that even happen?’”
With Kit and newsletters, the team is able to balance both teaching and writing.
How paid newsletters became their scalable, sustainable revenue stream
Today, about 75% of Ninja Writers’ revenue comes from service-based programs—coaching, live editing, feedback workshops. The other 25% comes from their paid newsletters on Kit.
They’re working to shift that balance to 50/50. Not because they want to stop coaching—they love it—but because that balance would give them more financial stability, more time to write, and the ability to serve more people at a price they can afford.
Book-a-Year Project: a daily writing community in your inbox
That’s why they launched Book-a-Year Project, a paid newsletter through Kit that shows up in subscribers’ inboxes every day with encouragement and accountability to write one book per year.
But Book-a-Year Project is so much more than a newsletter. It’s a writing community delivered daily.
Subscribers get daily motivation to write, live planning calls twice a month, a fiction book club where they read together, and weekly 15-page guides packed with everything Shaunta and Adrienne have taught about the craft of fiction writing over the years.
The newsletter is ad-free—no pitches, just value. But it became the gateway to everything else Ninja Writers offers. About 90% of their new coaching clients are already Book-a-Year Project subscribers.
We’re a writing community first and a coaching business second. The coaching business allows us to be able to have the writing community.
—Adrienne Grimes
And they’re seeing something beautiful happen with their newsletter programs that make the investment worth pursuing: Writers are finishing their books.
Book-a-Year Project just hit its one-year mark, and subscribers have been emailing to say they’ve written their first draft. They’re editing. They’re doing it.
“We’re definitely seeing people spend more time on the writing,” Adrienne says. “Before, our membership programs were almost like a gym—they had all these different classes, not everything was applicable to you. And the newsletter allows us to just kind of funnel it into one straight: just write your book. And there’s less distraction.”
The bigger vision: growing paid newsletters to 50% of their revenue
After seeing success with the Book-a-Year Project, they launched a second paid newsletter: the Working Writer Project. This one focuses on the business side of writing—building author platforms, creating editorial calendars, treating writing like a career instead of just a hobby.
As Shaunta and Adrienne are working to grow their newsletter footprint to be half of their business revenue, they’re reflective of what launching these newsletters on Kit means for their community.
“It’s really important to us to have something that is scalable and is an affordable price point for people that are just trying to make it work and do what they can with what they have,” Adrienne says.
Having a honed, scalable newsletter option means Ninja Writers can be more intentional with their business.
Why Kit became the backbone of their newsletter business
Ninja Writers has built a business our of connection and consistency with their community. But because of Kit, they’ve been able to scale beyond just coaching or their initial offerings.
Kit handles their newsletter subscriptions, automating daily delivery, and reducing platform fatigue for their community. With their automations and newsletters running in the background, Ninja Writers can focus on fostering their writing community—and creating themselves.
The strategy: free months, live sprints, and knowing every student’s story
Ninja Writers almost always offers a free month when people sign up for their paid newsletters. It’s a low-risk way for writers to see if it fits their routine. And their retention rate is strong. Most people who try it stay.
But what really makes the difference is the live connection the team offers.
They host free morning write-ins six days a week. Anyone can drop in and write with them for an hour. On the last Sunday of every month, they run a 12-hour writing marathon from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET where writers can pop in and out all day.
This is the structure that grants Shaunta and Adrienne time to write.
“We’re both writers ourselves,” Adrienne says. “The other half of doing all of this is that we’re both writers. And [we’re] very lucky that we have Ninja Writers as able to support our own writing. When we do these writing sprints in the mornings, we’re working. That’s our writing time that we just invited people to come in.”
Students aren’t just customers. They’re fellow writers working on their books together.
“We really know our students,” Shaunta says. “I often have somebody who will be part of Ninja Writers, leave for a couple of years, and they come back, and I still know their story, and it always surprises them. But it’s like my superpower. I just remember everyone’s stories.”
Scaling connection with Kit
That’s hard to do on a large scale, and Shaunta and Adrienne know it. There’s a conscious decision to limit how many people are part of the more hands-on programs.
“We can know a couple hundred people, but we can’t know thousands and thousands of people,” Shaunta says. “We would lose something that makes Ninja Writers what it is if we did that.”
The paid newsletters on Kit solved that tension. They let Shaunta and Adrienne reach a wider audience in a way they’re comfortable with: they don’t feel like they’re losing that connection with their community.
Their annual sales engine: January is their Black Friday
Every year during the last week of December, Ninja Writers runs a free program called Fresh Start. They meet on Zoom every day to help writers plan their year—making editorial calendars, setting reading lists, mapping out writing goals.
It’s their favorite thing to do, and it’s completely free. But it also sets the stage for their biggest sales period of the year: January.
“A big sale in January always works well for us because people are thinking about New Year’s resolutions,” Shaunta says. “They’re done with Christmas and everything, and maybe they have a little money from the holidays, and they’re ready to invest in something for the new year.”
This year, they’ve been running a free quarter-long course on plotting a novel that started in October and runs through mid-December. Every lesson gets sent out via Kit to their entire email list, and they’re hosting live calls alongside it.
It’s another way to engage their list, get people writing, and build that face-to-face connection before the new year.
“We found that just really engaging with our audience with those kind of free things that we can offer gives us a way to meet these people face-to-face and get to know their stories, which is our favorite part of all of it anyways, whether or not somebody is paying us or not,” Adrienne says.
What writing is really about: vulnerability, trust, and teaching
Teaching writing isn’t like teaching most things. It’s deeply personal. It’s vulnerable.
“I think with that vulnerability, it requires a more face-to-face connection in order to build that trust,” Adrienne says. “When we do workshops, we’re having them read their work out loud. It’s very vulnerable.”
That’s why they offer so many live, free touch points from morning write-ins to all-day writing sprints to planning calls. They need to build that trust before writers are willing to share their work.
“It’s important to us, on a philosophical basis, to offer as much as we can to the community so that people who don’t have the money to pay for expensive things or even inexpensive things are still getting something out of it,” Shaunta says.
That philosophy extends to how they price their paid newsletters. They want writing education to be accessible. They want to serve their community well, whether people are paying or not.
Advice for creators who want to build a community that lasts
If you’re thinking about starting your own paid newsletter or building a community around what you teach, Shaunta’s advice is simple: Think about what you needed when you were starting out and build that.
Whatever you’re creating, you’re probably doing something that you love or that you’re passionate about. That means that there are other people that are passionate about it too. If you just find a way to connect to people that are like you, you’re going to find your people.
—Shaunta Grimes
She also recommends reading Seth Godin’s book The Dip, which talks about pushing through the hard parts instead of giving up right before you break through.
“A lot of people give up in the part where it’s hard,” she says. “If they just kept going, if they just kept moving and working and moving forward, they would get past that dip and they would have something.”
For Ninja Writers, that something is a community that feels less like customers and more like family. A business that lets them write every single morning. And the joy of knowing they’re helping people tell their stories.
Build a paid newsletter that supports your creativity with Kit
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